The Cloud was designed based on parameters such as sunlight, outside spaces, living quality for inhabitants and the city. It is one of many projects in which MVRDV experiments with a raised city level to reinvent the often solitary typology of the skyscraper. It was not our intention to create an image resembling the attacks nor did we see the resemblance during the design process. We sincerely apologize to anyone whose feelings we have hurt, it was not our intention.

The design inspiration of The Cloud is visualised in the first image on our website, a cloud covering the centre of the Sky scraper.

The above-mentioned design inspiration:

Facebook

On their Facebook page, they add that “A real media storm has started and we receive threatening emails and calls of angry people calling us Al Qaeda lovers or worse.”

The designers haven’t said whether anyone thought of the resemblance before all this, but the Daily Newsdoes report that a Dutch newspaper quoted the firm’s spokesman saying that the designers had considered the “obvious parallels.”